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Exactly what I was wondering... I didn't had the feeling there was anything unusual on my system.

Turns out the guilty are:

270k - KDE svn source tree (didn't even know I had one, I only ordered to install latest KDE)
225k - portage, divided over 14k packages. Portage is famous for wasting inodes, I'd say.
64k - JaegerMonkey sourcetree (OK, another one I forgot. Why is it even still there?)
77k - /usr/share/doc, most of it developer documentation I wouldn't ever use, due to Gentoo's unability to disable "doc" for "dev-*".

Open Suse 11
`/var/lib/ntp/proc/4450/task/4450/fd/5': No such file or directory
find: `/var/lib/ntp/proc/4450/task/4450/fdinfo/5': No such file or directory
find: `/var/lib/ntp/proc/4450/fd/5': No such file or directory
find: `/var/lib/ntp/proc/4450/fdinfo/5': No such file or directory
find: `/proc/4450/task/4450/fd/5': No such file or directory
find: `/proc/4450/task/4450/fdinfo/5': No such file or directory
find: `/proc/4450/fd/5': No such file or directory
find: `/proc/4450/fdinfo/5': No such file or directory
519788

Buffer caching mitigates that a lot, and also helps with name/inum resolution.

Reading files that fill the buffer cache (e.g. playing movies) will hurt it.

I just did an rsync of /home, with both source and destinations on encrypted volumes. The activity on the backup volume far outstripped the activity on the source volume, because the source volume is regularly accessed. "df -m" shows:

That's on a dual-core Athlon 64, with 4G RAM and two SATA drives. /home's volume is on sda, and /rsync's volume is on sdb.

Oh, I should mention that about 45 seconds of that elapsed time was reading from an NFS mount, rather than the local volume. Still, 8% CPU and only 14.21 seconds system time for NFS networking access and encrypted volume access... that's not bad.

The security I get against a physical attack outweighs any disk slowdown that can be measured, but not felt.

I'll agree with Gus3. I compiled 2.6.35 on the same 1.6GHz dual core laptop one day to the next, after reinstalling with encrypted LVM. There is no greater use of lots of little disk files for me than that.

There was, maybe, 2 minutes of difference in time over the course of an hour between the two compiles, which might very well be caused by being the difference between the .6 to .7 kernels.